Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link

BIOGRAPHY LINK

A memoir of a mother who, after ending her nineteen-year marriage, staves off a perpetually empty bank account and, with the help of her three young sons, saves her century-old farmhouse from foreclosure, and reclaims her life on to what matters most.

Traces the author’s surprise discovery that his late mother had had a sister who was sent away under mysterious circumstances and never mentioned by the family again, his efforts to research his long-lost aunt’s story and whereabouts, and his struggles to understand the secrecy of her existence.

Beginning with her family’s harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner follows Bich Nguyen as she comes of age in the pre-PC-era Midwest. Filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, Nguyen’s desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food-Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House cookies. More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to become a “real” American.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle

HISTORY US MICHIGAN BOY

Follows the 1925 murder trial of African-American doctor Ossian Sweet, who was accused of murdering a white person during a mob attack on his home and includes a history of the Sweet family and a portrait of his attorney, Clarence Darrow.

Isadore's Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town by Mardi Link

TCRIME LIN

A gripping account of the mysterious disappearance of a young nun in a northern Michigan town and the national controversy that followed when she turned up dead and buried in the basement of the church.